A k-spanner of a graph G is a sparse subgraph that preserves its shortest path distances up to a multiplicative stretch factor of k, and a k-emulator is similar but not required to be a subgraph of G. A classic theorem by Althöfer et al. [Disc. Comp. Geom. '93] and Thorup and Zwick [JACM '05] shows that, despite the extra flexibility available to emulators, the size/stretch tradeoffs for spanners and emulators are equivalent. Our main result is that this equivalence in tradeoffs no longer holds in the commonly-studied setting of graphs with vertex failures. That is: we introduce a natural definition of vertex fault-tolerant emulators, and then we show a three-way tradeoff between size, stretch, and fault-tolerance for these emulators that polynomially surpasses the tradeoff known to be optimal for spanners. We complement our emulator upper bound with a lower bound construction that is essentially tight (within log n factors of the upper bound) when the stretch is 2k-1 and k is either a fixed odd integer or 2. We also show constructions of fault-tolerant emulators with additive error, demonstrating that these also enjoy significantly improved tradeoffs over those available for fault-tolerant additive spanners.
@InProceedings{bodwin_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.25, author = {Bodwin, Greg and Dinitz, Michael and Nazari, Yasamin}, title = {{Vertex Fault-Tolerant Emulators}}, booktitle = {13th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2022)}, pages = {25:1--25:22}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-217-4}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2022}, volume = {215}, editor = {Braverman, Mark}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.25}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-156217}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.25}, annote = {Keywords: Emulators, Fault Tolerance, Girth Conjecture} }
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